France For the fighting in France, see France, fall of, after this entry; for details of the activities of the Free French,see de Gaulle.

1. Introduction

The declaration of war against Germany at 1700 on 3 September 1939 by the government of Edouard Daladier was received by the French with a mixture of surprise, consternation, and resignation. Mobilization had been ordered the day before, and the war credits had been unanimously voted. Even if there was no overt enthusiasm for war, 76% of a public opinion poll in July 1939 had supported the notion of force if Hitler tried to seize Danzig. Contrary to claims later made by the Vichy government (see below), defence expenditure under the Popular Front had risen faster than other public spending, and under Daladier in 1938–9 the defence budget was trebled. Daladier, unlike Chamberlain, brought back no illusions after signing the Munich agreement, though the foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, was a fervent advocate of a settlement with Germany. The population, which stood at 41.18 million in 1936, had suffered terrible losses in the First World War (for losses in the Second see Table 3 at the end of this entry), and the French public was receptive to pacifist ideals in the 1930s, though national pride in the victory of 1918 remained high and no current of defeatism swept through France in September 1939. However, there was bewilderment at the shift of government policy from peace to war, and a feeling that France was too subservient to British foreign policy; there was also a lack of any motivating war aim. The emphasis was on defence.

After eight months of what was soon called the drôle de guerre (see phoney war), France was invaded on 10 May 1940 and staggeringly defeated in under six weeks. Reynaud, who had replaced Daladier on 20 March, resigned on 16 June. With the Germans already well south of Paris and the government evacuated to Bordeaux, the new premier, Marshal Philippe Pétain, aged 84, called on the French to lay down their arms. He negotiated an armistice first with Germany and then with Italy (which had declared war on France on 10 June but without any military successes). From June 1940 until the Allied invasions of June and August 1944 (see OVERLORD and French Riviera landings), France was subjected to German, and partially Italian, occupation, but until November 1942 there was an unoccupied zone in the south. From this zone Pétain led a government centred on the spa town of Vichy and created a new État (State). The regime became increasingly identified with collaboration and collapsed at the liberation of France, when the Allied forces, de Gaulle and the Free French, and the widespread resistance movements within France (see below), all joined to drive out the invader. In August 1944 a Provisional government under de Gaulle took power. It was formally recognized by the Allies in October 1944, and France ended the Second World War as one of the victorious powers.

2. Domestic life, economy, and war effort

Following the Nazi–Soviet Pact, much of the first four months of the war against Nazi Germany was spent by press and public in calls for action against communism and Soviet Russia. The fate of the Finns in the snows of the Winter War (see Finnish –Soviet war) preoccupied the popular magazines such as Match. On the German Front the daily communiqué was rien à signaler (‘nothing to report’), and people began to complain of being badly informed. The broadcasts of the minister of information, the playwright Jean Giraudoux, were too abstract, and the large numbers who heard Paul Ferdonnet broadcasting for Germany on Radio Stuttgart and proclaiming that ‘the British would fight to the last Frenchman’, felt that Germany was winning the propaganda war (see subversive warfare). French posters promised, ‘Nous vaincrons parce que nous sommes les plus forts’ (‘We shall win because we are the stronger’) and few people doubted this. They were also reassured by Daladier's promise in December 1939 that French blood would not be needlessly spilt. But once the Germans had crossed the Meuse, the pattern of poor information produced a rash of rumours which fuelled the panic of the population. Marc Bloch in L'Etrange Défaite (‘Strange Defeat’) was one of many to look back on the drôle de guerre and accuse the authorities of not respecting the public's right to know.

In the general mobilization workers had been taken out of vital factories and sent to the front, so that peasants should not once again bear the brunt of the war. Production immediately slumped, so that two million workers were brought back and specially assigned to the armaments industry. Rural attitudes hardened against this decision. Nothing, however, prepared town or country for the mass exodus of population provoked by the German invasion. This civil disaster is inseparable from the military fall of France. It was the biggest migration of people seen in Europe since the Dark Ages. In the hot sun of May and June, broken by fierce thunderstorms, between 8 and 10 million people fled from their homes (see also refugees). Hundreds of children were separated from their parents, hundreds of lives lost in the low-level strafing by the Luftwaffe. The experience was a nightmare. In the depths of despair people welcomed Pétain's cease-fire. Acceptance of his sacrificial gesture, when he pledged to give himself to France (le don de ma personne), produced a cult of the Marshal which assumed religious proportions, though the veneration for his moral leadership did not translate into equal support for the Vichy government. Pétainism as a popular force survived until 1943 or after, but the public had lost any early hopes in Vichy by the winter of 1941–2. Where Pétain appeared to unite, Vichy divided.

Pétainism and Vichy did not monopolize people's choice, and as more and more people chose to adopt attitudes, or undertake actions, of resistance, this too became a determinant in their lives. It is difficult, therefore, to generalize about the war effort or the economy. For some it was a matter of working resentfully for the Germans, for others it was a question of maintaining a distinct French economy, and for still more it was undermining German economic demands (see Tables 1 and 2) by strikes, go-slows, non-co-operation and sabotage (see subversive warfare), and of diverting resources to the Resistance. Vichy extended rationing and state control of prices and labour, and comités d'organisation were entrusted with the day-to-day running of the economy within the framework of a labour charter which banned all national trade unions and instituted a corporate system of industrial relations based on the individual firm. At the top, economic technocrats produced a ten-year plan in 1942, which gave priority to the agricultural sector, in line with expectations of the French role within the German-dominated New Europe (seeGermany, 4). All such planning was vitiated by acute shortages of materials and labour due to German controls and the absence of 1,600,000 men in prisoner-of-war camps. By 1943 Germany was taking 40% of France's total industrial out put, including 80% of its vehicle production. At least 55% of the government's revenue went to meeting the costs of occupation, set at 20,000,000 marks per day, with an imposed exchange rate devaluing the franc by 20%. France became the most important source of raw materials, foodstuffs, and manufactured goods for the German economy, totalling goods and services roughly equivalent to a quarter of Germany's gross national product.

France, 2, Table 1: German requisitions.Percentage of French output.

Source: Contributor.
Corn	13%
Hay	19
Meat	21
Fish	30
Potatoes	2
Sugar	1
Tobacco	7
Beer	10
Champagne	56
Spirits	25
Wood	50
Coal	29
Mineral ores	74
Steel	51
Bauxite	50
Aluminium	75
Rubber	38
Sulphuric acid	36
Vegetable oils	40
Wool	59
Cotton	53
Flax	65
Copper	67
Cement	55

France, 2, Table 2: German orders to French industry. Percentage of total orders.

These figures have been arrived at by comparing different sets of official statistics. Given the disparities within these statistics, all figures have to be treated with caution.
Source: Contributor.
Aeronautical	67–100%
Automobile	68
Electrical	43
Shipbuilding	78
Chemical	33
Rubber	62
Woollen	28
Cotton	15
Hosiery	16
Building and public works	72
Quarrying	55

Within this economic subjection, labour was forced to play a substantial part. Service in Germany was introduced by Vichy on a nominally voluntary basis in June 1942: it became an obligatory duty imposed on all male workers of national service age by the promulgation of the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), the Compulsory Labour Service, on 16 February 1943. This law was the single biggest spur to public resistance, and the popular revolt against STO severely undermined the forces of law and order. Nevertheless more than 600,000 men were sent to Germany, and a larger number was drafted into French mines and industries deemed essential to the Germans, such as bauxite and aluminium, or engaged in construction works such as the Atlantic Wall, run by the Todt Organization.

Shortages (la disette) and making-do (known as le système ‘D’ from débrouiller, to manage), were the staple features of everyday life. Only 65% of pre-war coal production was achieved; industrial production fell to 38% of 1938 levels; agricultural productivity was reduced by 30%, and the average cost of living went up by 270%. A notional calorie intake set at 1,200 a day was an insufficient diet, and even that was rarely obtained by the poorer sections of society who could not afford black market prices. By early 1942 Vichy faced the constant threat and reality of food riots and demonstrations, led by women whose earning power had been curtailed by Vichy's hostility to working mothers. Peasant producers alienated the towns by refusing to sell at the uneconomic prices enforced by Vichy, but they also undermined German requisitions and in many areas became an integral part of the maquis. In the citrus fruits and wine-producing areas of the south, where the climate made it impossible to cultivate extra vegetables, there was both urban and rural deprivation, while in the north there was the added scourge of Allied bombing. This began in earnest on 3 March 1942 with a raid on the Renault factories in the suburbs of Paris which cost 623 lives, exceeded by the raid on Nantes on 16 September which killed 1,150. The French ultimately lost more than 60,000 in Allied raids—about the same number as the British lost to German air attacks—but the context was one of a violent upsurge in German deportations, repression, and reprisals from 1942 to 1944, including the brutal deportation of more than 75,000 Jewish men, women, and children (see Final Solution).

The liberation brought ecstatic scenes throughout France and nurtured hopes of radical change, but there were still the same, or even worse, problems of shortages and underproduction. The French war effort continued with less than half the railways in use, moribund industrial plant, the franc at a sixth of its 1939 strength, and a quarter of all buildings damaged or destroyed. Needing urgent help in resettlement were a million homeless families, the survivors of the camps and over a million returning prisoners of war, the population of Alsace-Lorraine, which had to be reintegrated, and refugees from all the battle zones. De Gaulle's Provisional government (see government (d) below) set up comités d'entreprise to stimulate production, and nationalized the northern coal mines and the Renault car works, but they had to continue unpopular requisitioning of food and strict rationing during an unusually long winter, which made the festive rejoicings of the liberation seem a little premature. On the domestic front the war had largely been a struggle for personal survival, finally, but not completely, subsumed in the collective struggle of the resistance. The humbling subjection of loss and defeat, and the ambiguities resulting from the occupation, could not as easily be assimilated.

3. Government

(a) Pre-armistice

In March 1940 Daladier's policy of caution—not just towards Germany but also towards helping the Finns—was rejected as inaction, though at home he had made a move against the USSR by dissolving the Communist Party and arresting hundreds of its members. This persecution did much to keep party loyalties alive in clandestine survival and create an important training-ground for later resistance.

Daladier's successor, Paul Reynaud, appeared more belligerent than he actually was, and policy did not radically change. He was confident in France's long-term superiority, backed by the resources of the empire (see empire, below). The unreality was shattered by the rapid German advances, and ironically the men brought in to stiffen French resolve, General Weygand as C-in-C, and the venerable Marshal Pétain, became the focus for a group in the cabinet which decided the war was lost. They prepared the way for an armistice, rejecting last-minute ideas of continuing government from either Brittany or North Africa, favoured by Reynaud, and the idea of a Franco-British union, improbably dreamed up in London to prevent a French surrender.

Caught in the exodus of population and administrators, the government had trailed south to Bordeaux, while town halls were vacated with scant regard for the fate of people left behind or overtaken by the Germans. Posters produced by the German forces played on the theme of an ‘abandoned people’, and Pétain quickly decided that the institutions of the Third Republic had failed the country both before and during the crisis. His broadcast of 17 June made no attempt to blame the army leaders for the defeat, and the armistice was negotiated against a background of political recrimination. Technically it was the last government of the Third Republic which signed the armistice and organized the vote in the National Assembly on 10 July 1940 which gave full powers to Pétain. The overwhelming mandate by senators and deputies (569 votes to 80) allowed Pétain to promulgate the first constitutional acts of a new state, and it is with his regime that the armistice became associated. The acts carried a vague promise of ratification by the nation and it was on the basis of this slender gesture to democracy that many republican stalwarts voted for the Marshal. It was only seven days after the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, and the politicians were meeting at Vichy, only a short distance from the heavy German presence on the demarcation line. The vote was a turning inwards under the shock of the débâcle and the feeling of being betrayed by the UK which, once again, was perceived as l'Albion perfide. There was also a genuine belief that Pétain had saved France from an even greater disaster. It was the beginning of the cult of Pétainism, which gave him a personal ascendancy of mythic proportions.

(b) The Occupiers

The armistice was signed in a staged re-enactment of 1918, with the Germans imposing many of the same conditions which had humiliated them after the First World War. The French Army was reduced to 100,000 men, occupation costs were set astronomically high, and France was divided into several different zones of occupation (see Map 34). The French lost the industries of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais which came within the zone attached to direct German rule from Brussels, and the main zone occupée, covering the north and west of the country, contained most of France's industrial wealth and the majority of its population. Paris became the seat of the German Military Administration (Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich) and the capital bristled with German checkpoints, street signs, and Nazi insignia. Every large town had its Feldkommandantur and sizeable forces billeted on the population. The armistice made no mention of Alsace and Lorraine, but they were annexed outright by Germany as the first spoils of war, and administered by Nazi Gauleiters as part of the Reich. Intense Germanization followed, together with the expulsion of the part of the population considered implacably French, and the mobilization of young men into the German Army.

The Germans used the demarcation line between the zone occupée and the zone libre to regulate the flow of goods and people, forcing the French in the south to keep the millions of refugees for two or three months while they established an efficient occupation in the north. It allowed them to appear organized and generous in the facilities provided, and subsequent collaboration with the Germans, or attentisme (waiting on events), often started with the perception of the occupiers as disciplined and correct. Subsequently many local German commanders extended their reputation for decency by opposing the infiltration of the Gestapo, but by 1942 its presence was everywhere, and General Karl Oberg was officially invested as head of its operations in France on 28 April 1942 by Heydrich himself.

German propaganda and cultural control were mediated through the Propaganda-Abteilung and the German embassy in Paris, from which Otto Abetz (1903–58), a francophile Nazi, divided and ruled among the French collaborationist and fascist groups in the capital, and kept in touch with Vichy through the regime's own ambassador to the occupying forces, Ferdinand de Brinon. Abetz's sociability and patronage were central to the projection of a New Europe, crusading against Bolshevism and democracy under Nazi leadership, a vision whose realization in France was disputed by Fritz Sauckel and Albert Speer in their competing spheres of labour and production. Sauckel tried to bleed France of all the workers he could transfer into German factories, while Speer undercut his position by keeping substantial numbers in France, employed within his rationalized plan for a new European economy.

By mid-1942 the ideological presence of the Germans was stamped by intensified punishment, repression, and racial persecution. A system of hostage-taking, torture, and executions dominated the German response to resistance attacks, and in 1943–4 this oppression spread to reprisals on whole villages. A hideous norm was set on the night of 1 April 1944 with the massacre of 86 civilians in the village of Ascq near Lille, after an explosion halted a German troop train, but caused no casualties. After the Normandy landings there were massacres at Tulle (99 men hanged), at Oradour-sur-Glane (more than 600 villagers shot/burned alive), and in the villages of the Vercors (scores of villagers killed after the defeat of the Maquis). Few areas of France did not experience some atrocities in the last months of the occupation, the crimes against civilians being perpetrated partly in revenge for resistance actions, partly as punishment for the unwillingness of local officials to intensify the hunt for resisters. In the last six months of the occupation, the Germans encroached on more and more areas previously designated as Vichy spheres of government and by mid-1944 German resources for controlling France were at breaking-point, raising the issue of how Germany could possibly have governed France for four years without the co-operation of Vichy.

This co-operation, or collaboration, was at its height in 1942 when Germany extended the Final Solution to France. A savage hunt for Jews in Paris on 16– 17 July 1942 led to appalling scenes of inhumanity when more than 13,000 children, women, and men were herded into the Vélodrome d'Hiver and brutally ‘sorted’ in the camps of Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, and Drancy before being deported to the death camps in the east (see OPERATION REINHARD). French police and authorities provided much of the information, assisted in the round-up, and staffed the intermediate camps, and in the Vichy zone carried out similar deportations during August. Ironically it was fascist Italy, in its zone of occupation in south-east France, which provided administrative protection for hunted Jews. Only the premature announcement of Italy's change to the Allied side prevented the escape of thousands of Jews from Nice in the autumn of 1943. The immediate German occupation of the town exposed them to ruthless pursuit and deportation.

(c) The Vichy regime

The spa town of Vichy was envisaged only as a stopping place before a projected return of government to Paris. Archives have shown that Pétain had peace with Germany in mind when he made his overtures for an armistice. In the event he led the new regime from Vichy's Hôtel du Parc for over four years, prefacing the government's decrees with the monarchical formula ‘Nous, Philippe Pétain . . .’.

Vichy's rule covered both major zones, but in the zone occupée it was subject to the German authorities in Paris. In the zone libre it had complete executive power within the restrictions of the armistice.

Vichy was an authoritarian state, patriarchal and messianic, its break with the Republic encoded in a new triad, Travail, Famille, Patrie, (work, family, fatherland). It corresponded to the nationalist values which Charles Maurras had advocated since his opposition to the Dreyfusards in the 1890s, extolling the traditions of old, provincial France, the need to return to rural life (retour à la terre), the sanctity of the family with the woman's place in the home (la femme au foyer), the benefits of corporatism in industry, and the exclusion of those seen as internal enemies, specifically Jews, Freemasons, and communists. On these principles Vichy launched a moral programme to rejuvenate France by youth organizations, a revived role for the Catholic Church in education, good works known as l'œuvre du Maréchal, and the healthy pursuit of sport and the outdoor life. Presented in the form of a Révolution Nationale (National Revolution), this ideological offensive was not entirely to the liking of the occupying Germans, who mistrusted its patriotic potential, and several of Vichy's institutional initiatives were banned from the occupied zone. These included the Légion française des Combattants formed of soldiers from both wars, but soon open to all devotees of the National Revolution; the Chantiers de la Jeunesse (youth work camps), compulsory for men aged 20; and the Compagnons de France, a voluntary youth formation.

It is the mixture of autonomy and constraint which needs to be stressed. Vichy was not installed by the Germans as a puppet regime. It was the result of choices and preferences by French politicians who had rejected parliamentary rule (and who included certain dissidents of the Left), and by national figures from the armed forces, high finance, and industrial management who claimed they could salvage France from the wreckage of defeat.

Vichy represented a plurality of aims and motivations, but from the start it was a divisive and punitive regime, acting under the illusion that the widespread veneration for Pétain indicated a similar consensus for its political and social programme. If there was a consensus it was merely a product of the shock and disorientation of the defeat and it did not extend far beyond the winter of 1940–1. By then Vichy had swept away the elected local councils, replaced the mayors of the larger towns with its own nominees, abolished the national structure of trade unions and the federation of employers, reduced all Jews to second-class citizens or worse by two racially-based laws, the Statuts des Juifs, and stepped up the persecution of communists. The Freemasons had dissolved their lodges under government pressure, and state employees in all professions were subject to dismissal for left-wing associations. It was the purge of the Popular Front, for which over half of France had voted in 1936. Vichy appeared as a force not of national integration but of political retribution. Its outsiders, mainly immigrant Jews, were interned in camps, first used by Spanish refugees, in the south-west, and a General Commissariat to oversee all Jews and liquidate Jewish businesses was entrusted to Xavier Vallat, who was not pro-German but had introduced anti-Semitic bills throughout the 1930s. In May 1942 his place was taken by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, an open and venomous racist and advocate of deportation.

Much of the logic behind the armistice had derived from a conviction that France stood alone. The sense of having escaped from the defeat with some measure of national sovereignty and territory intact encouraged Vichy ministers, and particularly Pierre Laval, the vice-premier, to pursue further negotiations with Germany to improve the position of France in what was presumed to be a new European constellation dominated by Germany. It was not expected that the UK would survive a German attack, and no credence was given to General de Gaulle's appeal of 18 June. He was judged to have deserted the French Army and was sentenced to death in absentia. Laval was a tough negotiator and manipulator, an activist in diplomacy in which he pushed at the frontiers of constraint. As an index of his readiness for co-operation, he offered the occupiers the French shares in the Bohr copper mines in Yugoslavia and eased the transfer of the Belgian gold reserves into German hands. He was rewarded by an unexpected meeting with Hitler on 22 October 1940, followed by a second meeting at the small railway station of Montoire two days later. Pétain too came to Montoire, and the handshake of victor and vanquished took on immediate symbolic value. Little was agreed at the meeting, but Pétain used the term ‘collaboration’ to set up expectations of a two-way process of mutual benefit to France and Germany, which the French public greeted with the first signs of unease. They were momentarily reassured when Pétain sacked Laval on 13 December 1940, for outdistancing other ministers in his approaches to the Germans. In fact Laval's ultimate successor, the anglophobe Admiral Darlan, came closer to a military commitment to the German cause than any minister either before or after, until the use of the Milice in the military suppression of the resistance in the last year of the occupation. In May 1941, Darlan offered Hitler the use of French bases in Syria (see Syrian campaign), and brought back from Berchtesgaden proposals for a form of joint action in the Middle East, which were known as the Paris protocols. Pétain refused to sign and Darlan backed down, his ‘grand design’ against the UK reduced to provocative use of the French fleet to accompany merchant shipping between North Africa and metropolitan France. In so doing he cultivated a special relationship with the USA, whose ambassador to Vichy, Admiral Leahy, accepted Darlan's assurances that the French fleet and colonies would not be surrendered to the Germans. Darlan used the channel of the US embassy to warn the UK against any interference with French merchant convoys, and in May 1941 indignantly accused it of piratical acts and the seizure of 167 ships. Once the USA moved towards greater commitment to the British cause, Darlan was forced to offer Washington concessions in the French waters of the Caribbean while hiding them from the increasingly exigent Germans. It was evidence of Darlan's success that Leahy stayed on in Vichy after the entry of the USA into the war, and was not recalled by Roosevelt until Laval's return to power in April 1942. American respect for Darlan later became the dynamic in US attitudes towards the rivalry between de Gaulle and first Darlan, then Giraud, in North Africa after the Anglo-American landings in November 1942 (see North African campaign). Darlan had remained as commander-in-chief after his loss of power to Laval, and he was in Algeria at the time of the landings. His understanding with the Americans eased the change to the Allied camp. Pétain initially instructed Darlan to resist in the name of French neutrality, but was said to have approved after the event. He now had the opportunity to join Darlan in North Africa, but refused to do so, reaffirming his sacrificial duty to remain in France.

In response to Sauckel's demand for French labour, Laval had set up a ‘relief’ scheme with the Germans by which one prisoner-of-war would be returned for every three skilled workers who volunteered for work in Germany. It was a typical Laval initiative, offering the Germans a concession in order to avoid something worse, and Laval erected his strategy into a ‘shield philosophy’ protecting France from the possible rule of a Gauleiter. But it was not just manipulation: the volunteer prisoner relief scheme (la Relève) was announced by Laval with the statement that he wished for a German victory to prevent the spread of Bolshevism across the continent. These words of 22 June 1942, broadcast to the nation, announced an ideological partnership with Germany, which his collaboration in the deportation of immigrant Jews from the southern camps in August more than confirmed. It was the darkest point of Vichy government. He surrendered thousands of families who believed they had found asylum in France, insisting that they ‘must all go’ including the very youngest children. Many Jews were found hiding-places in rural areas by humanitarian and resistance action, but the deportations were not halted.

The German occupation of the zone libre on 11 November 1942 destroyed any last vestige of the revivalism of 1940. The programme of the National Revolution had fallen short of its own ideals, and now Vichy lost its armistice army and its fleet (see French fleet, scuttling of). It was under mounting pressure from Sauckel that Laval, on 16 February 1943, made the STO compulsory, but the creation of the Milice in January was part of Vichy's own internal move towards a more active partnership with Germany in the repression of resistance. The agreements between the head of the Gestapo in France, General Karl Oberg, and the secretary-general to the Vichy police, René Bousquet, were a cornerstone of this partnership. At local level scores of Vichy administrators and gendarmerie marked their opposition to the new measures by obstructionism and covert support for those on the run. As an administrative unity, Vichy was disintegrating. In January 1944, the accession to ministerial power of Darnand, head of the Milice, and Philippe Henriot, the effective propagandist on Vichy radio, signalled a further acceleration of repression. On 20 January special courts martial were instituted to expedite the trial of resisters, and armed mobile police (Groupes Mobiles de Réserve) and Milice fought alongside German troops against strongholds of the resistance. Neither Pétain nor Laval ever accepted a co-belligerent status with the Germans in the international war, but both accepted the co-ordination of internal warfare against the resistance. It was not civil war; the repressive forces of Vichy were a very small minority of the French. But it was the final submission of Vichy to the occupiers, and with the liberation of France the government of Vichy, including a protesting Pétain, were taken under German protection to the castle of Sigmaringen on the Danube. From there they went into exile or returned to be judged as traitors by post-liberation courts. Vichy legislation was declared null and void.

The regime has left a legacy of shame, ambiguity, and recurrent controversy, now known as the ‘Vichy syndrome’. Certain of its social policies, such as improved antenatal provision, and its cultural interest in rural traditions are often traded against its negative achievements, and it is acknowledged that most local administrators did try to minimize the impact of the German occupation, and did not promote the Milice. In its first three years Vichy stood opposed to the collaborationist groups of Paris run by Jacques Doriot (Parti populaire français) and Marcel Déat (Rassemblement national populaire), and initially refused to give national status to the 3,000 French who fought with the Germans on the Eastern Front in the LVF (Légion des Volontaires français contre le Bolchevisme). But Déat became minister of labour in March 1944, and the LVF was partly legitimated by a change of name. Vichy's racial deportations and internal repression corresponded closely to German demands, and at the very least it can be said that Vichy played a supporting role in the history of Nazism.

(d) Post-occupation government

The structures of government which took power at the Liberation had been meticulously planned by the Gaullist resistance well over a year before Vichy finally collapsed. The pivotal role was that of the Commissaires de la République, who took the place of Vichy's regional prefects and who mediated the decisions of de Gaulle's Provisional government to the Comités Départementaux de Libération composed of local resistance notables. The euphoria and aspirations of the local resistance made these committees the focus for ideas of social change and democratic renewal, but de Gaulle was determined to reconstitute the French state from the top, and his own rejection of the defunct Third Republic and his insistence that worthy resisters should head the new structures of power satisfied many people's desire for change.

Conflicts of aims were, however, not infrequent, and certain commissaires, notably Raymond Aubrac in Marseilles and Yves Farge in Lyons, became identified with the more radical resistance pressures, while the centres of Toulouse and Limoges seemed to threaten overall Gaullist control by their responsiveness to movements of popular power and idealism. Had the Provisional government been more narrowly based it might have provoked even wider protests, but it was representative of most strands of the resistance and included two communists, Charles Tillon, the leader of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français or FTPF, being one of them. The Provisional government was the French Committee for National Liberation renamed, and in the transfer from Algiers to Paris had lost none of its claims to speak for both the Free French and the internal resistance: Georges Bidault, the internal leader of the National Council for Resistance was appointed by de Gaulle as foreign minister, and a socialist, Adrien Tixier, who had been outside France throughout the occupation, as minister of the interior, a crossing of roles which symbolized the unity of the liberation. Recognized by the UK and USA on 23 October 1944 (it had been recognized by the USSR in 1941), the Provisional government defused much of the tension at local level by three major, but controversial, moves. In the first place it rationalized the ad hoc process of épuration (the purge of collaborators) through the institution of Special Courts of Justice, in which the number of acquittals rapidly came to exceed the convictions; secondly it undermined the status of the Maquis groups by fusing them into the regular army, and thirdly it demobilized and disarmed the local resistance police, the milices patriotiques, and created its own new police force the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité (CRS). The Communist Party made no attempt to foster revolutionary ideas, but rather consolidated its popular respectability as the party martyred in the resistance (‘le parti des fusillés’), and agreed that national elections should be postponed until the return of prisoners and deportees. Municipal elections (in which women voted for the first time) were held in April– May 1945 and confirmed both the success of resistance individuals and the return of party politics, and when elections to a Constituent Assembly followed in October, over 80% of the seats went to the parties of the Left. The voters had overwhelmingly repudiated the right-wing ideology of Vichy, and in an accompanying referendum they also rejected any return to the Third Republic. They were far less united on what kind of a regime the Fourth Republic should be.

4. Empire

When war broke out the empire was considered one of the main reasons for French optimism. It furnished comforting images of world power, economic resources, and vast reserves of military potential. At the mobilization in August and September 1939, twelve divisions were created from the Armée d'Afrique (see armed forces (b), below), seven divisions of North African infantry, one Moroccan division, and four African divisions, and by June 1940 some 80,000 colonial troops were deployed on the European stage, the Tirailleurs from Senegal being considered by the French public as invincible warriors. After the fall of France the Germans treated the black soldiers as racial inferiors, and ordered that the bodies of those killed in the fighting should be left where they fell. (Many were secretly given decent burial by French civilians, a humanitarian act which often represented the first impulse to resistance). It is curious, therefore, that the Armée d'Afrique was allowed to continue and even to expand in the autumn of 1940, and Vichy made much of its diplomacy which had protected the integrity of the empire. It stood firm against any colonial pact with either the Allies or the Free French, and within the colonies the values of Vichy and the leadership of Pétain were enthusiastically embraced by most of the French settlers and governing authorities. Vichy rule was distant, but present, in the protectorate of French Morocco, and the mandates of Syria and the Lebanon, fervent and popular in Senegal (see French West Africa) under Governor-General Pierre Boisson, authoritarian and punitive under Vice-Admiral Robert in the French West Indies, strongly Pétainist under General Weygand in Algeria, and effectively coexistent with the Beyhmed in the protectorate of Tunisia, until the new Bey Moncef placed himself at the head of the nationalists in June 1942. Vichy's hold was weakest over French Indo-China where Admiral Jean Decoux was forced to concede air and naval bases to Japan in a steady loss of French power, culminating in the deposition of the French governor by the Japanese military command in March 1945.

Well before that date Vichy's imperial pride was undermined from within when the poorer black regions in French Equatorial Africa opted for the Free French and General de Gaulle in August 1940, a crucial strategic and moral secession initiated by the black governor of the Chad, Governor Félix Eboué. In the French West Indies black opposition to the contemptuous rule of Admiral Robert began to look to the Free French, and the Pacific colonies of Tahiti, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, and the Marquesas all sided with de Gaulle as did the few remaining French colonial enclaves in India, the Chinese treaty port of Kwangchowan, and, after they had been occupied by the Free French in December 1941, St Pierre and Miquelon. But it was the TORCH landings in North Africa in November 1942 which decisively ended Vichy's colonial and imperial power, and took the French empire once more into the war on the Allied side. The transition for Senegal, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia was facilitated by the presence of Admiral Darlan and the leadership of General Giraud, so that the alternative for Pétainist officers of submission to Gaullism or continuing opposition to it was avoided. In Madagascar the Vichy authorities had tried to resist British invasion, but by September 1942 the British were in a position to hand it over to de Gaulle. Soon after, the Réunion Islands went over to the Gaullists, followed by French Somaliland which was starving under the British blockade.

By the end of 1942 Vichy had lost its Armistice Army, its fleet, and then its Armée d'Afrique and its empire. But the re-entry of colonial armies into the war against Germany, and the presence of many individuals as volunteers with the Free French, kept the colonies within the orbit of French national and imperial power. De Gaulle in 1944 had more reason than Pétain in 1940 to regard the empire as his underlying strength. His debt to the peoples of black Africa was later to play a role in shaping his relative success in the process of decolonization. At the same time, the reaffirmation of Empire (see Brazzaville conference), as France came back into the war as a full belligerent, also accounts for the failure of France to reconsider its imperial assumptions in the most divided of its overseas territories, French Indo-China and Algeria. The new Algerian statute of 7 March 1945 merely perpetuated the rule of racial discrimination, and when a revolt broke out in Kabylia in May, it was crushed with great brutality. Another war of liberation loomed, in which the Algerian people would claim the mantle of resistance.

5. Civil defence

Civil defence was attached to the ministry of war in liaison with the army's anti-aircraft posts which defended many French towns, and depended on volunteers formed in the Association des Volontaires de la Défense passive. Towns were divided into sectors, sectors into îlots (blocks) each with its chef (head) who supervised all aspects of air raid protection. In November 1938 the possession of gas masks was made compulsory, but on 1 September 1939 only a third of the numbers needed were available, though this had doubled by May 1940. The new phrase mobilisation des civils (civilian mobilization) in 1938 was popularized in 600,000 copies of a short guide to civil defence. After the first air raid warning in Paris on 2 September 1939, volunteers enlisted in their thousands. The death penalty was prescribed for anyone caught in the act of pillage during a raid. Several thousand small fines were imposed during the drôle de guerre for pacifist or defeatist remarks. Sandbags protected Notre-Dame's sculptured porch, and works of art were put in the vaults of the Banque de France or sent away to provincial châteaux. Women's employment was accelerated, and 20,000 extra nurses were enrolled in Paris. Children had been evacuated from the northern and eastern frontiers, but a normal start of the school year, and inaction on the front, prompted many parents to bring them back. After the German invasion a psychosis of fear fuelled extravagant beliefs in treason and fifth columnists, of which there was little hard evidence. Lone motorcyclists were the prime suspects. The massive exodus of the population made it impossible to defend bridges and roads, and local civil defence was in no way equipped to do so.

6. Armed forces

(a) High Command

The massive fortifications and subterranean defences of the Maginot Line embodied the military thinking of the general staff, whose strategic ideas were based on the lessons of the First World War and not on the immediate evidence of the Spanish Civil War, nor on the notions of mechanized mobility enshrined in de Gaulle's book Vers l'armée de métier (‘Towards a Professional Army’) which was published in 1934.

Preparations in terms of conscription had been reduced between 1928 and 1935, when the length of military service was only one year. In March 1935 it was raised to two, but the vast bulk of the mobilized reserve in 1939 came from those trained in the one-year period, with a resulting shortage of combat skills. There had been considerable recruitment in the colonies under the energetic direction of Georges Mandel (1885–1944). The fleet, the fourth most important after the UK, the USA, and Japan, was also cast in a defensive role, its strategy linked closely to British dominance in the Atlantic and North Sea. The air force, which only became an independent force in 1934, was continually subjected to pressure from the army to subordinate its operations to the land war. In May 1940 the legacy of peacetime left it under-prepared, ill-equipped, and poorly organized for modern war.

In August 1939, in preparation for joint hostilities against Germany, the French and the British formed a Supreme War Council, but this was not an operational HQ. The previous month Chamberlain had suggested forming a joint general staff, but the C-in-C of the French Army, the 68-year-old General Gamelin, was not interested in this proposition. Instead, the British Expeditionary Force was placed under the command of General Alphonse Georges, who as commander of the North-East Front became, in effect, Gamelin's commander in the field, while Gamelin acted as a kind of supremo (see Chart), not only of the ground forces in metropolitan France but overseas as well. However, he had no direct control of either the air force or the navy. His successor, General Weygand, was appointed Chief of the General Staff of National Defence and C-in-C of all theatres of operations (land, sea, and air) on 19 May 1940, but never exercised his powers. There was no equivalent of the British Chiefs of Staff committee and liaison between the military and their civilian masters was inadequate.

This command system, exacerbated by a mutual antipathy between the two principal protagonists, proved a recipe for disaster, for Georges was responsible for fighting a battle according to plans drawn up by Gamelin with an army which Gamelin had moulded to his own concepts. As a result, once the Germans launched their offensive in the west (see FALL GELB), no one was certain who was actually controlling the battle and this confusion was compounded by the proliferation of headquarters and an inadequate communications system. Gamelin had his command post at Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris while Georges had his main HQ at La Ferté-sous-Joarre some 65 km. (40 m.) east of the capital but spent much of his time at his command post—and residence—at Bondons, 19 km. (12 m.) away. A third, Grand General HQ, commanded by a major général (chief of staff), was situated at Montry 32 km. (20 m.), east of Vincennes and south-west of La Ferté, and the C-in-C of the Air Force, General Joseph Vuillemin, had his HQ at a fourth place, St. Jean-les-deux-Jurneaux, near La Ferté; while Admiral Darlan's French naval headquarters was at Maintenon, south-west of Paris.

Montry contained the four Bureaux of the French High Command: First (personnel and organization), Second (intelligence), Third (operations), and Fourth (transport and services). The staff officers of three of them had to divide their time between Montry and La Ferté. The staff of the Fourth Bureau remained at Montry which meant Georges had no immediate access to it. The telephone network was totally inadequate and there was no teletype service between these HQ or between any of them and the armies in the field. Most despatches were sent by motor bike but as several riders were killed in accidents or ended up in a ditch this must have proved as unreliable as the telephone. Consequently, it took six hours for the Army to tell the Air Force which targets it wanted attacked and Gamelin later calculated that it took 48 hours for one of his orders to arrive and be executed by those in the field.

(b) Army

This fell into three groupings: the Armée Métropolitaine, Armée d'Afrique, and the Troupes Coloniales. In theory, each was raised to defend its own territory. The Armée Métropolitaine, underpinned by regular cadres, was a conscript army whose task was to defend metropolitan France. The Armée d'Afrique garrisoned Algeria, Tunisia, and French Morocco and it included a number of white European-only units such as the Foreign Legion and Zouaves as well as the conscripted Spahis and Tirailleurs—drawn from the indigenous population—and the irregular Goums and Compagnies Sahariennes (camel companies). The Troupes Coloniales, which defended France's other colonies, contained the white-only Colonial infantry and Colonial artillery regiments, mostly volunteer only, and Tirailleurs formed from men from those colonies which had French subject status. In practice, units from both colonial armies were also stationed in France while recruits in the Armée Métropolitaine sometimes had to serve in North Africa if not further afield. In September 1939 over 38% of France's infantry were North African Tirailleurs and it was men from the two colonial forces which largely comprised the Free French forces which so distinguished themselves in the North African and Italian campaigns—particularly at Monte Cassino—and during the fighting which followed the French Riviera landings.

Seen at the time, the French army mobilized in September 1939 and totalling just under 5 million soldiers, was thought by many—among them Stalin—to be the best in the world, heavily armed and well-equipped and led by highly acclaimed veterans of the victorious army of 1918. Churchill believed that the UK would be safe behind the French army, and the French themselves knew that they had a further two million possible soldiers available in the Empire. Any reconstruction of 1940 must remember that a German attack across the Ardennes and the Meuse was thought to be a military impossibility, even when the French secret services told the High Command of its imminence. In most comparisons of men, material and arms, France was the equal of Germany, and seemed well poised to resist a long drawn-out war. It was the German superiority in the operational deployment and use of tanks and planes that made these comparisons in retrospect look irrelevant.

Of the 94 French divisions at the front or in reserve, 63 were infantry—30 regular, the rest reserve divisions formed around a cadre of regulars—seven were motorized infantry, three were light mechanized, five were cavalry, 13 were attached to the fortifications, and three were heavy armoured. Of the latter, two were assembled in January 1940 and the third composed during March. An improvised fourth was partly constructed in May after the German breakthrough.

Under General Gamelin, the Land Forces C-in-C, who was replaced on 19 May by Weygand summoned from the Middle East, was the North-East Front commanded by General Georges; General Giraud's Seventh Army in the coastal region; General Pierre Billotte's First Army Group, which defended the front from Maulde to the western end of the Maginot Line; General Prételat's Second Army Group and General Besson's Third Army Group which held the Alsace-Lorraine frontiers from Longuyon to Basle; and the Fourth Army Group, under General Olry which held the Alpine Front. The heavy armoured divisions were in reserve, as were two of the motorized infantry divisions, and more than half of the French tanks were spread among the infantry divisions, General Estienne's ‘assault tank’ having been renamed ‘accompanying tank’ in the 1930s. The total number of tanks was estimated at over 3,000 on 10 May 1940, and the quality was high, with the Char B tank one of the best war machines of 1940 and the Somua 35 fast for its 20 tons. When all armoured vehicles are taken into account, the French numbers were almost identical to the Germans', though they suffered generally from poor deployment, slower speeds, and insufficient radio communications equipment. French artillery was superior in numbers (10,700 against 7,378) but not in quality, for half the French pieces were the obsolescent 75 mm. (2.9 in.) First World War field gun while the Germans had the modern 105 mm. (4 in.) gun. More importantly, the French utilized their artillery no better than their aircraft and tanks. It was geared to static warfare and was almost entirely horse-drawn; much of it was paralysed on the roads during the exodus of civilians.

anti-tank weapons were thought to be ultimately decisive in open battle, and yet France was still short of such weaponry in May 1940, despite accelerated production during the drôle de guerre. Anti-aircraft guns were only taken seriously after 1935, it being presumed that fighter planes were the best defence against enemy aircraft. In September 1939 there were only 325 20 mm. (0.78 in.) and 25 mm. (0.98 in.) machine-guns and cannon out of a planned total of 5,043; 1,696 40 mm. (1.5 in.) and 75 mm. (2.9 in.) cannon out of 2,036; and 16 90 mm. (3.5 in.) anti-aircraft guns for the army's Défence Aérienne du Territoire out of 480. In May 1940 ammunition of many kinds was in short supply, particularly for anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns.

On the Alpine Front which was under Gamelin not Georges, the Fourth Army Group of two mountain divisions and one conventional infantry division were defending well-fortified positions. They had very few anti-aircraft guns and only one small group of fighter planes. Commanded by the energetic General Olry, they faced Italian troops who outnumbered them by seven to one and had considerable air support. Despite intensive bombing these frontiers were successfully held during the battle of the Alps from 20 to 25 June 1940.

After the fall of France in June 1940, the armistice brought a reduction of the army in metropolitan France to 100,000 and a total demobilization of the air force. Military eyes turned to North Africa, where the Armée d'Afrique was authorized to expand to 127,000 after the Royal Navy's attack on Mers-el-Kébir and the Dakar expedition. Under first Weygand and then General Juin, it built up to a figure of almost 225,000 including troops from French West Africa and those repatriated after engagements against Free French and British forces in the Syrian campaign. It was heavily armed with modern weapons, and the officers were fiercely attached to Pétain. A direct take-over by de Gaulle at the time of the Allied landings in North Africa (TORCH) in November 1942 would have been unthinkable.

In France the Armée de l'Armistice, by comparison, was only permitted light weapons and its transport was reduced to horses and bicycles. Its eight divisions were stationed at provincial centres in the zone libre, but a small number of the abler officers took the opportunity to leave and found a role in different branches of the resistance. Those who were left merely decorated the parades and politics of Vichy. The prisoners-of-war in Germany were not forgotten. Of the two million rounded up during the defeat and kept in transit camps, some 1,600,000 were transported into the Reich. It was the major duty of Vichy's Légion des Combattants to look after their families, most of whom were in the rural areas of France, hence Laval's hope that the Relève scheme (see government (c), above) would find favour among the peasantry. Despite the scheme almost a million were still in Germany at the liberation, mostly used as workers for German agriculture and industry and thus exposed to Allied bombing.

The result of TORCH was to make the troops of North Africa available to the Allies, while in France the armistice army was dissolved by German order on the invasion of the zone libre. For several officers this was the decisive break with the Vichy regime, General de Lattre de Tassigny making for the mountains before being arrested and then escaping to North Africa, and General Giraud taking up the leadership of the Armée d'Afrique. After Darlan's assassination Giraud became military leader in Algeria, disputing authority with de Gaulle. Under his command the Armée d'Afrique's victories in Tunisia in May 1943 ranked with those of the Free French fighting with Leclerc at Kufra (see Fezzan campaigns) and General Koenig at Bir Hakeim. Giraud obtained an agreement with Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 (see SYMBOL) which envisaged the creation of eleven French divisions. Only eight were formed, three of them armoured, one of which, the Second, integrated troops from French equatorial Africa under General Leclerc, a fervent Gaullist and opposed to Giraud's lingering attachment to the principles of the National Revolution. Although outmanoeuvred by de Gaulle at the end of 1943, Giraud's military role continued until he resigned in April 1944, and the Armée d'Afrique distinguished itself in the Italian campaign (see French Expeditionary Corps).

It was de Lattre and not Giraud who was given the French command of Armée B in the French Riviera landings on 15 August 1944, Leclerc's division having been diverted to take part in the Normandy campaign within Patton's Third US Army. Koenig was given command of the armed resistance, formed into FFI (Forces françaises de l'Intérieur), which were effectively organized from the spring of 1944 onwards. The immediate achievement of the FFI, the Free French, and the Armée d'Afrique was to vindicate the right of the French to govern their own liberated country, and Leclerc's contribution to the liberation of Paris and de Lattre's to the liberation of the south brought external and internal resistance together. The FFI, however, resented the way in which the resistance was demobilized by the provincial government between 19 and 24 September 1944, leading to the loss of status and individuality of the Maquis resistance units which had been formed from the grass roots. In all, 120–140,000 from the FFI enlisted as regular soldiers, to which must be added those left to harass the ‘Atlantic pockets’ of Royan, La Rochelle, St Nazaire, and Lorient, where the Germans held out with superior heavy armaments. The main bulk of the reconstituted French armies, which fought as part of Devers's Sixth Army Group, as the First French Army, liberated Alsace in cruel winter fighting before crossing into the south of Germany and sharing in the Allied victory, marked by the presence of de Lattre at the German capitulation. The winter hardships severely tested the endurance of the colonial troops who had fought through Tunisia and Italy, and it became a point of honour in later years for Africans and Algerians to remind the French that a major role had been played in the liberation of France by troops from the Third World. The Martiniquan writer Frantz Fanon (1925–61) and the Algerian nationalist Ahmed Ben Bella (b.1916), were both decorated in the Italian campaign.

By May 1945, France possessed eighteen divisions with a top-heavy officer corps from which many of the ex-FFI leaders retired. Their hopes of a new, democratic army had gone. The French armed forces had achieved everything except their own structural reform.

(c) Navy

The French fleet, whose C-in-C was the highly respected and capable Admiral Darlan, was calculated at over 660,000 tons in 1939—the fourth largest in the world—a new navy having been built in the five years before the war which absorbed 27% of the military budget. Many of its warships were new and though they lacked modern equipment such as radar and SONAR, they were mostly manned by professional, long-service officers and seamen. Between October 1939 and June 1940 the fleet's warships worked with the Royal Navy on convoy escort duties and acquitted themselves with distinction during the Norwegian campaign and the Dunkirk evacuation. They also rescued thousands of British soldiers from the Brittany ports. Unlike the French Army, the navy's morale and command communications remained intact during the fall of France and all French warships and merchant ships were removed in good time from ports threatened by the German advance. These included the new battleship Richelieu, which was still undergoing acceptance trials when she escaped from Brest to Dakar on 18 June, and her sister ship Jean Bart, which had to be removed from her dock at St Nazaire in an unfinished condition and was sailed to Casablanca. Two old battleships, eight destroyers, three submarines, and some smaller vessels went to Portsmouth and Plymouth; the two modern battle-cruisers Strasbourg and Dunkerque—as powerful as any battle-cruiser the Germans had afloat—six destroyers, two older battleships, and a seaplane carrier sailed to the Algerian naval base of Mers-el-Kébir; six cruisers went to Algiers; and many of the survivors of the French fleet of 80 submarines (24 had been sunk) found refuge in Bizerta. These apart, most of the smaller vessels went to Toulon; a squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral Godfroy, of a battleship, four cruisers, and three destroyers, which had been working with Admiral Cunningham's Mediterranean fleet remained at Alexandria; and there were also a few minor warships in the French West Indies.

Under the terms of the armistice with the Germans the French fleet should have been deactivated, but because of the British attack on it at Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 this was not enforced and was only partly carried out. Ships in British ports were taken over—one French officer on board the submarine Surcouf was killed during this operation—and their crews were interned. Later, the crews were given the opportunity of being repatriated to Casablanca. Most accepted, but those who remained formed, with their ships, the nucleus of the Free French Navy and later in the war Richelieu served with the British Home and Pacific fleets (see Task Force 57).

Those ships which stayed under Vichy control remained largely quiescent. But naval aircraft bombed Gibraltar in retaliation for Mers-el-Kébir; a squadron of French cruisers was sent to support Vichy forces in French Equatorial Africa but were turned back by the British (see North, Admiral); Richelieu and other naval units helped repel the Anglo-French Dakar expedition in September 1940; French warships supported Vichy forces during the Syrian campaign in mid-1941 and the British attack on Madagascar in May 1942; and Jean Bart defended Casablanca in November 1942 when US forces landed there at the start of the North African campaign. By that time most of the surviving warships not at Alexandria or under British command were at Toulon where they were sunk by their crews before the Germans could seize them (see French fleet, scuttling of).

(d) Air force

The air force was under the overall command of General Joseph Vuillemin who, to give him his due, served a High Command which had a very restricted notion of modern air power—at a lecture in 1939 Gamelin was heard to remark that there was no such thing as a battle of the air, there was only the battle on the ground—and whose command system was complex and confused. As a result of a pre-war struggle, Vuillemin had been left with direct control only over the general air reserve. In February 1940 an air co-operation force on the North-Eastern Front was created under General Tétu, who was subordinate both to Vuillemin and to General Alphonse Georges, the theatre land commander; his command was in turn subdivided into zones of aerial co-operation corresponding to those of the army groups on the North-Eastern Front. An organization which appeared sensible in theory turned out to be disastrous in practice: operational commanders received orders from at least three different sources and available fighter aircraft were scattered right along the front and could not be concentrated to meet the main enemy thrust.

The inadequacy of the air force in respect of equipment in May 1940 was in part the result of the unresolved struggle with the army during the inter-war years over whether it should exercise an independent strategic role in war or concentrate on tactical co-operation with the army. After an ill-judged attempt to build an all-purpose aircraft (the BCR) between 1933 and 1936, specialized fighters were developed which were obsolescent by the time they went into combat: the Morane 445, the main French fighter, was 80 km/h (50 mph) slower than the Me109 and only fractionally faster than the Do17 bomber. As with the land army, the French Air Force was caught in the middle of a rearmament programme on 10 May 1940: of a total of 2,200 planes, less than half were modern types—610 fighters, 130 bombers, and 350 reconnaissance aircraft. They were annihilated by a combination of German Flak and the Luftwaffe.

There are many puzzling features about the French Air Force in 1940. One that has been seen as particularly damning was that Vuillemin ended his war with more aircraft than he had at the start. In fact, this is a tribute to the herculean efforts of the French aircraft industry in the rushed rearmament programme which began on the eve of the war: at the end of 1938 it produced 40 planes a month, a year later 300 a month, and 500 in May 1940. Some of these aircraft were incomplete, but in any case Vuillemin could make little use of them because of a crippling shortage of pilots, of whom he had only 700 to fly the 637 front-line fighters available when the war in the west began. The mass of conflicting evidence about the air force produced at the Riom trial during the war and at the post-war parliamentary commission of enquiry aimed more at self-exculpation than at an explanation of the air force's performance in the battle for France.

7. Intelligence

In 1939 the hub of French intelligence and counter-espionage was the Deuxième Bureau, directed by Colonel Rivet, and responsible to the minister of war and to the Commander-in-Chief. When war was declared the Cinquième Bureau took over counter-espionage, reinforced by the police brigades of the Surveillance du Territoire (internal security) set up in March 1937. Arrests for espionage quadrupled in 1937, and the numbers doubled in 1938 and 1939. In 1940 they spiralled to a figure above 1,200 in response to national anxieties about the fifth column. Officers were pulled in two potentially different directions in the last years of the 1930s; by individual involvement in the right-wing subterranean organization known as the Cagoule (hooded men) determined to purge the army of presumed communist infiltration; and by the official pursuit of German and Italian agents. The ambivalence was perpetuated into the occupation.

The Free French set up their own intelligence service in London, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA), while at Vichy, Rivet and the head of counter-espionage, Captain Paul Paillole, by-passed German restrictions by setting up cover organizations under names of rural conservation and works (Travaux Ruraux). Their tightrope between resistance and Vichy involved a double game that was particularly ambivalent for Rivet whose Vichy role involved uncovering menées antinationales (subversive activities), interpreted to mean any action destabilizing the Vichy regime. Vichy kept two secret files, known as S and S1 listing people to be arrested immediately there was any major disturbance. On these lists figured communists, Spanish republicans and other anti-fascists, and many ‘notorious Gaullists’. In Nice one intelligence officer, Captain Beaune, took this repressive role to the limit, becoming the intelligence arm of Darnand's Milice. Both Rivet and Paillole penetrated German security and sent valuable information to the Allies, which led to the arrest and torture of over 300 intelligence officers by the Germans after their invasion of the southern zone. The two men crossed to Algiers, where their activities, which included running a double cross committee (see XX-committee), continued under Giraud, before eventually, against their will, being fused with the BCRA into the Direction générale des services spéciaux (General Directorate for Special Services), attached to de Gaulle and directed by Jacques Soustelle.

Similar in its secret intentions to Rivet and Paillole's cover operations was Commandant Mollard's camouflage of army vehicles, masquerading as an agricultural machinery business. The vehicles hidden in rural depots were found by the Germans after November 1942, but several hundred had been shipped clandestinely to North Africa.

Finally, internal information under Vichy was provided by the secret Service du Contrôle Technique (Technical Control Service) which censored post and telephones on a vast scale. It was brought under the direct authority of Laval from August 1942, and its brief radically changed from monitoring public opinion to control, linking surveillance to repression. The Free French set up their own alternative postal censorship in Algiers, but this did not reveal the existence of the Vichy system.

8. Merchant marine

At the outbreak of war France had the seventh largest merchant fleet in the world, with 502 ships over 1,600 tons, many of which were on short haul duty from North Africa. In peacetime Germany and Poland had supplied over one-third of French coal, carried by rail and canal, but once the war started this had to be imported from the UK by sea. The task revealed that the French fleet available was too small; there were few neutral ships on hand and a belated Anglo-French agreement on shipping matters was not negotiated until December 1939. The drastic coal shortage remained unsolved. Other imports by sea were also inadequate, rising no higher than 50% of French needs in the period September 1939 to June 1940.

After the fall of France the 2.6 million tons of the French fleet began to be sequestered. The British requisitioned some 400,000 tons found in British and Dominion ports, and attempted to put pressure on Vichy by blockading the straits of Gibraltar. The effects were mitigated by the strength of French shipping in the Mediterranean, but Vichy propaganda accused the British of trying to starve the French people. By 1942 almost a quarter of French pre-war shipping was serving the Allied cause, with the Free French operating their own merchant navy, manned where possible by French crews who numbered approximately 3,000 officers and men by 1942. In a sample six months from September 1941 this fleet carried 590,000 tons of supplies for the Allies. In addition several French luxury liners were converted into troop carriers: the Île de France (41,500 tons) transported more than 300,000 troops both in the Indian Ocean and from Canada to Britain. The most prestigious liner, the Normandie, at 83,000 tons the largest in the world, was requisitioned in the USA, but fell foul of a mysterious fire and sank in the Hudson river. Other liners, celebrated on the routes of the Far East, entered Free French service, the Maréchal Joffre escaping from Manila just as the Japanese occupied it. After the success of the Allied North African campaign, French ships seized by the Allies in African ports were allowed to continue to fly the French flag in the Allied cause, and ten French coasters took part in the Sicilian campaign. However, when the zone libre was overrun in November 1942, the Germans and Italians seized, and shared, nearly 290,000 tons of French shipping, by which time the Japanese had also acquired some 20 French merchant ships, mostly from the ports of Saigon and Yokohama.

9. Resistance

At the origin of resistance lay numerous acts of individual defiance and dissidence (see Source K, for example). They were marked by their isolation from each other and by a huge range of aspirations. There were small ad hoc actions ‘to annoy the Germans’ (narguer les Allemands), which were as spontaneous as giving occupying troops wrong information in the street. At the other end of the scale there was no shortage of grand designs, of which de Gaulle's appeal of 18 June 1940 was an example. His was a pioneering voice outside France, though not widely heard at the time, and there were similar lone voices, or tracts, within France which carried the same message: that the war must go on, but clearly by different means. Jean Texcier, a civil servant in the ministry of commerce, wrote a series of tracts called Conseils à l'occupé (‘Advice to the Occupied’) in July 1940; General Gabriel-Roger Cochet of the French Air Force wrote another series called Tour d'Horizon (‘General Survey’); Captain Henri Frenay, who escaped from a transit prisoner-of-war camp, set out his plans for a whole network of intelligence, propaganda, and armed struggle in the autumn of 1940; Bertie Albrecht used her social work, sanctioned by Vichy, as a cover for collecting and distributing information; Emmanuel d'Astier left the navy and came together with Jean Cavaillès, a philosophy professor, Lucie Aubrac, a history teacher, and others to work out ideas for a ‘Dernière Colonne’ (last column) to continue the fight; Agnès Humbert helped produce the first journal called Résistance at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris; Marie-Madeleine Fourcade started intelligence work from her youth centre in Vichy; individual communists, notably Charles Tillon in Bordeaux, Georges Guingouin, a schoolteacher near Limoges, Joseph Pastor in Marseilles, and Auguste Lecœur in the mining area of the Nord, all found ways of breaking out of the confusion caused in the Communist Party by the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and defied party directives when their activity was discouraged. All these, and many others, envisaged and initiated exactly what resistance eventually became, an alternative France, made up of diffuse personalities, professions, and skills.

Such early diversity, and the growth of defiance from below, gave resistance an intractable complexity which was difficult to organize and control from above. It did not spring ready-armed from the strategic planning of an army headquarters or a political party. It was civilian-based, even where individual army personnel were involved, and the civilians brought to it a wide variety of personal experience, from an intimate knowledge of the Pyrenees which enabled British pilots to escape, to the technicalities of typesetting which lay behind the clandestine press.

The individuals involved were initially a very small minority within France.Their first task was to convince others. Necessarily resistance was counter-information. Clandestine publishing was action; distributing a news-sheet was organization and recruitment. Newspapers became synonymous with movements: Combat, Franc-Tireur, and Libération (sud) in the south, Défense de la France, Libération (nord), and La Voix du Nord in the north. The Communist Party, while still subservient to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, had reissued L'Humanité, and once the pact was dead after Hitler's invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), the party emerged officially from its period of neutrality and followed its dissident individual members into anti-German activity. The communist-based Front National was the only movement in 1941–2 to be organized across both zones. No other party structures survived the 10 July vote in Vichy, which handed the government over to Pétain, though a group of socialists re-formed in the winter of 1940–1 and brought out their clandestine newspaper, Le Populaire. Catholics and Protestants in Lyons combined to issue the foremost Christian journal of Resistance, Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien (‘Journal of Christian Testimony’). Copies of Défense de la France ran to over 400,000 in January 1944, and most other large papers had print runs of 100–150,000.

Armed action was rare at the start, though a flamboyant royalist, Jacques Renouvin, created groupes francs (irregulars) in the area of Montpellier and used explosives against collaborators. It was the embryo for the eventual Armée Secrète (AS) attached to Combat, and other groupes francs developed an urban style of guerrilla activity, alongside the communist-run Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), which had grown out of early sabotage action pioneered by Albert Ouzoulias in the Paris region. The miners' strike in the Nord in May 1941 showed that collective confrontation was possible, but workers found sabotage far more effective. The railway workers (cheminots) were able to co-ordinate action over considerable distances, and Résistance-fer (railway resistance) became a major force, well equipped and financed, for example, in the Languedoc, by Tony Brooks, one of many SOE agents parachuted from London. Recruiting professional workers to resist in their jobs became a distinctive branch of resistance called Noyautage des Administrations Publiques (Infiltration of Civil Administration) as did Action ouvrière (workers' action), which specialized in industrial sabotage. The movements had their own intelligence sections and networks of liaison agents, most of whom were women who were able to travel more inconspicuously than men, often carrying arms and ammunition as well as messages and tracts. All resistance depended on infrastructures of anonymity, and for that reason the names of many essential resisters went unrecorded except at local level.

It was the more secretive networks (réseaux) of intelligence and escape which forged the first working links with the British or the Free French in London. The Free French network Confrérie Notre Dame (Brotherhood of Our Lady), whose main agent was ‘Colonel Rémy’ ( Gilbert Renault), grouped together volunteers who had started their resistance with highly amateur attempts to send photographs of German troop movements to London. The British-financed network Alliance originated with the conspiratorial Georges Loustaunau-Lacau who had contacts in the French secret services. After his arrest it was run by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade with direct links with British intelligence (see spies). Other networks with codenames were implanted by SOE whose F section set up, funded, and armed countless local resistance groups between 1942–4. These carried out acts such as the sabotage of the Peugeot factory, organized by Harry Rée at Montbéliard, which saved lives that would otherwise have been lost in Allied air raids. SOE, MI6, and the Free French BCRA operated independently in France, not without some organizational rivalries, but all dependent on British money and French volunteers.

Resistance activity at several points appeared likely to polarize between communists and Gaullists, though the FTP and the Front National were far from exclusively communist in composition, and many non-communist resisters were wary of too close a control by de Gaulle. In January 1943 Pierre Brosselette, Christian Pineau, and finally Jean Moulin succeeded in bringing non-communist resistance together in the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR) in the south, and a Co-ordinating Committee in the north. Although the communists were outside the MUR they were involved in Moulin's last achievement before his arrest on 21 June 1943, the creation of the National Council for Resistance (CNR), which set out a post-liberation charter of sweepingpolitical and social change. Both the MUR and the CNR acknowledged de Gaulle as leader of the resistance, but at all levels the vitality of the internal movements was maintained. Moulin was very much de Gaulle's envoy: his successor at the head of the CNR, Georges Bidault, came from the resistance within France.

With the creation of the Maquis in the course of 1943, independence and diversity were yet again at the centre of the resistance experience. The German occupation of the whole of France forced increasing numbers of resisters, anti-fascists from many countries, and victimized groups into the search for safer hiding-places which only the forests and hills could provide. The revolt of thousands of workers against labour deportation (STO) intensified this need and provided a youthful influx into the resistance. The percentage of réfractaires (STO evaders) who went into the Maquis varied from 5% in some areas to 50% in others, but the popular revolt against STO sustained the Maquis everywhere. Both the Armée Secrète, now within the MUR, and the FTP, created their own Maquis groups, most remaining small and mobile, but some gathering thousands into entrenched positions in the Savoyard Alps and in the centre of the Massif Central. It was in the Glières in March 1944, Mont Mouchet in early June, and the Vercors in July that the Maquis faced overwhelming force of arms, mounted by Germans and Vichy armed police, backed by the Milice who specialized in the rooting out of Maquis sympathizers in the villages. The losses were heavy, particularly in the Vercors where Allied reinforcements were expected to the very last telegram sent by the desperate Maquis leaders. Elsewhere Maquis groups perfected mobile guerrilla tactics of harassment, sabotage, and ambushes, inspired by the news that Corsica had been liberated by these very tactics in September 1943, aided by shock troops from the Armée d'Afrique. Arms were always insufficient, though Allied parachute drops of weapons and crucial supplies proliferated in the spring of 1944. The FTP received few direct drops; their policy of immediate action by all possible means had gained them many recruits within France, and dramatic successes, but their activism did not always conform to Allied strategy which moulded Maquis action round the plans for the Normandy landings.

The Maquis did not monopolize armed action, which accelerated in the towns, too, in late 1943. In Paris the immigrant communist workers' organization, Main-d'œuvre immigrée (MOI), launched more than 40 raids on German installations and personnel between June and November before the leading group, run by Missak Manouchian, an Armenian, was betrayed and decimated. The Germans tried to pillory them as foreign criminals through a poster, l'affiche rouge, which carried their photographs. For many French this was the way they learned with gratitude that Jews and immigrants were an integral part of French resistance. Their role was all too easily marginalized after the war.

After February 1944 all armed Resistance was, in principle, brought within the FFI, and during the Normandy landings British, American, and French agents joined with the internal resistance to execute support plans codenamed Green, Violet, and Blue to immobilize railways, telephones lines, and electrical power in the areas behind the German lines. In the south-west, Maquis and other units crucially delayed the SS division Das Reich on its way to Normandy, and after the French Riviera landings in mid-August, the Alpine Maquis cleared a path for the invading French and Americans. The cost throughout France was the death, torture, or deportation of more than 90,000 resisters, both men and women, and the deaths of thousands of people in German reprisals.

The Resistance liberated the Savoyard Alps, the south-west and much of the centre of France as the Germans retreated, and played an equally major role in the liberation of Paris (see Paris rising). The manner of liberation reflected both the diversity of the resistance and the variables in the nature of collaboration. The purging (épuration) of collaborators was accompanied in some places by the arbitrary settling of scores, but the incidence of such acts declined substantially with the appointment of the Special Courts of Justice. In all, executions by the resistance before and after the liberation amounted to just over 10,800, according to the official figures. The variance in the nature and aims of the liberation committees formed in each département kept certain localities in a state of unsettled expectancy until the Provisional government consolidated its control. At its head General de Gaulle had staged a triumphant entry into Paris, where he maintained that the Republic had never been constitutionally abolished. Women were empowered to vote by an ordinance of 5 October 1944, and the resistance Union des femmes françaises looked set to become a force in post-liberation politics. Yet, like almost all resistance movements, it was soon subsumed in the return of party politics. The resistance did not become a single, coherent, and innovative political organization. For some it seemed as if a vital opportunity to create a new France had been missed. But a new Catholic democratic party did have its origins in resistance, the Mouvement républicain populaire headed by eminent Catholic resisters, and they played a pioneering role in shaping a new economic and political alignment within Europe, with visions of European unity which had been nurtured by the common opposition to Nazism across occupied Europe. The success of resistance was also marked in French standing after the war. Despite being excluded from the Yalta conference (see ARGONAUT), France was invited to be one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and to have its own zone of occupation in defeated Germany (see Allied Control Commissions). For individuals, at both national and local level, a resistance past became a touchstone of personal merit, and the little-known monuments scattered throughout the French countryside and in the backstreets of towns testify to the fact that the history of the French resistance was the story of very ordinary people.

10. Culture

At all levels the culture of occupied France was responsive to theambiguities of the situation. People interpreted a single play, film, or song in diametrically opposed ways, looking for nuances inexpression, double meanings, and covert intentions. The reopening of the Paris night clubs, music halls, and theracecourse at Longchamp, could be interpreted as a servile acceptance of the German presence, or the robust reassertion of a distinctive French way of life; ‘Notre Espoir’, sung by Maurice Chevalier in 1941, was first taken as Pétainist and later sung in expectation of the liberation; the patriotism of Charles Péguy's writings was claimed by both Vichy and the resistance, as was the historical legacy of Joan of Arc. Was it the English or the invaders who were her enemy? Films like Marcel Carné's Les visiteurs du soir and Jean Grémillon's Le ciel est à vous, plays like Jean Anouilh's Antigone and Henry de Montherlant's La Reine Morte, and the novel Pilote de Guerre (Flight to Arras) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry were all products of the period, received with rival enthusiasms by Vichy sympathizers and by resisters. Certain intellectual and cultural institutions, such as the Ecole des cadres (staff academy) at Uriage or the artists' association Jeune France, started as expressions of Vichy but developed independently in the opposite direction. The revival of regional folklore and culture was given high priority by Vichy, but it also had its place in the local nature of the Maquis. The hills and valleys of the Cévennes, for example, were valued for their distinctive culture by Jean Chiappe, the collaborationist prefect of the Gard, but the Cévenol traditions of the Camisards, and Protestant culture, sustained every act of resistance. The poet Pierre Seghers exploited the limits of hidden meanings in his annual editions of Poésie which had started as collections of war poetry Poètes casqués (‘Poets in Helmets’), in 1939; and literary journals such as Confluences, founded by René Tavernier in 1941, and Fontaine, run by Max-Pol Fouchet from Algiers, carried the process to even finer shades of cultural ambiguity.

Radio and cinema were increasingly important, at a time when gatherings, dances, and festivals were progressively banned, but both were caught up in the fundamental polarities of the time. Radio-Paris was repudiated as pro-German (‘Radio-Paris ment (tells lies), Radio-Paris est allemand’ ran the popular refrain), and listeners to the BBC programme ‘Les Français parlent aux Français’ valued it as much as relief from an unrelieved diet of German and Vichy martial music, as for its overt resistance message. The cinema was a place to express opinions by catcalls at the German newsreels, a place to keep warm in winter, and a place to drop resistance leaflets from the balcony as the lights went down. Film stars filled the pages of the illustrated magazines, although photographs of Danielle Darrieux, Suzy Delair, Albert Préjean, and others leaving for a goodwill visit to Germany in March 1942, fuelled contempt, not adulation.

It was a productive time for both film-makers and playwrights, with houses full and involvement high. Alongside Carné and Grémillon were younger directors, Robert Bresson, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Claude Autant-Lara who produced work of quality. Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis was the aesthetic triumph of 1944. New plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Montherlant, and Anouilh were an indication of theatrical vitality. Provincial theatre companies flourished, in one of which, La roulotte (‘the caravan’), Jean Vilar made his début. A vogue for the classics met the prescribed aesthetics of Vichy, but also allowed the portrayal of moral choices, heroines and heroes, the dark side of the gods, and the concept of destiny. They offered both escape and commitment. The popular singers— Tino Rossi, Charles Trenet, Suzy Solidor, Maurice Chevalier, André Claveau, Léo Marjane—provided an easy charm and an appearance of life as usual, with the occasional poignant hint of nostalgia or yearning for better days. The same could be said of the Académie Goncourt which continued its prize-givings almost as if nothing had changed.

Survivalism, in fact, was something of an art in itself, reaffirming for some the role of artist as observer. Picasso, for example, contrived to live peacefully and creatively in Paris. His representation of the horror of war in Guernica is echoed in several of his works during the occupation, and due to the antagonism of the Spanish leader, Franco, and accusations of communism and decadence from Germany, he was not allowed to exhibit. But he was not molested by either Vichy or the Gestapo. In similar ways, Jean Cocteau continued his own style of life, though not without an aura of compromise. Open to the bizarre in every day events he eventually saw the strange poetic quality of the BBC's coded messages to the Resistance, and he used them to great atmospheric effect in his imaginative film, Orphée ( 1950).

But there was also culture without equivocation. Collaborationist writers such as Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, and Alain Laubreaux, the anti-Semitic Céline, and the media entrepreneur Jean Luchaire, dominated the cultural and publication scene patronized by Otto Abetz, the Nazi ambassador in Paris. The literary talent of these figures gave their versions of fascism both individualism and panache and the post-liberation purges struck hard at these intellectual allies of the Nazi presence, confirming the significance of their cultural contribution. At the other end of the polarity, Resistance literature in clandestine editions was revealed at the liberation to have been surprisingly prolific. Editions de Minuit, founded in 1941 by Vercors ( Jean Bruller) and Pierre de Lescure produced some twenty titles, the first of which, Le Silence de la Mer by Vercors, astounded the small circle of its readers by the quality of the product and the sensitivity of its story. In 1942 a resistance Comité National des Ecrivains (Writers' National Committee) began to publish two cultural reviews, Les Lettres françaises and Les Etoiles, and the poetry, above all of Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, expressed the emotional depth and clarity of the resistance commitment. With paper and printing ink not easily available the poem and the song carried the clandestine struggle forward with precision and brevity. The RAF dropped thousands of copies of Eluard's poem ‘Liberté’ into France, and Emmanuel d'Astier brought the most potent of Resistance songs, ‘Le chant des partisans’, from London in September 1943. With words by Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, and a Russian melody adapted by Anna Marly, it was sung everywhere at the liberation, rivalling in popularity the jazz of Django Reinhardt and Glenn Miller's ‘In the mood’ to which everyone danced in the rediscovery of freedom.

In everyday life the curfew imposed by the Germans led the French to read more books and write more letters than ever before. Sport, notably athletics, flourished under the aegis of Jean Borotra, the ex-Wimbledon champion and Pétain's crusading minister of sport, whose admiration for Englishness eventually took him into opposition and led to his deportation. As a paean to the outdoor life, Vichy culture took people into the countryside. If they returned with a few mushrooms and a kilo of potatoes it was worth it. But harm was done. For years after the liberation rural values were equated with Vichy. It was eventually the emergence of a new regionalism and the culture of ecology which perhaps marked the final post-war break with the legacy of Vichy France.

France, Table 3: The human losses. Deaths.

Military
Source: Contributor.
1939–40	92,000
1940–5	58,000
FFI in 1944	20,000
Alsace-Lorrainers conscripted into
German Army	40,000
total	210,000
Civilian
Bombings	60,000
Resistance losses and German
atrocities	60,000
Executions	30,000
total	150,000
Prisoners and deportees
Prisoners-of-war	40,000
Racial deportees	100,000
Political deportees	60,000
French workers in Germany	40,000
total	240,000
grand total	600,000

Roderick Kedward

Bibliography

Jackson, J. , The Dark Years: France 1940–1944 (Oxford, 2001).
Kedward, H. R. In Search of the Maquis (Oxford, 1993).
—— Resistance in Vichy France (Oxford, 1978).
Marrus, M. R., and and Paxton, R. O. , Vichy France and the Jews (New York, 1981).
Paxton, R. O. , Vichy France. Old Guard and New Order (New York, 1972).
Rousso, H. , The Vichy Syndrome. History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
Sweets, J. F. , Choices in Vichy France (New York, 1986).

Louis Pierre Édouard Bignon , 1771-1841, French diplomat and historian. He held diplomatic posts under Napoleon, was acting minister of foreign affairs during the Hundred Days, and signed the surrender of Paris after Waterloo. A member of the chamber of deputies in the Restoration, he was (1830) foreign minister under Louis Philippe, who raised him to the peerage. His major historical work, Histoire de France sous Napoléon (14 vol., 1829-50; completed posthumously by A. A. Ernouf), was commissioned by Napoleon.